Somnia Blockchain
Somnia is a pioneering L1 blockchain designed to support high-throughput use cases such as gaming and events, where rapid and localized interactions are common. Unlike traditional blockchains, which often struggle with scalability and efficiency, Somnia introduces an innovative architecture optimized for speed and throughput, achieving industry leading performance metrics.
Core Features
EVM Compatibility: Somnia is built on the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM), ensuring compatibility with a wide range of existing applications and smart contracts.
High Throughput: In initial testing with 100 validators, Somnia can process 100,000’s of EVM transactions per second on non-sharded data, significantly surpassing the capabilities of current EVM blockchains.
Low costs: By redesigning how transactions are processed and state is managed, Somnia should deliver unparalleled cost and price stability.
Addressing Blockchain Bottlenecks
Somnia tackles four primary challenges head-on:
Execution Speed: By translating EVM bytecode to highly optimized native code, Somnia achieves execution speeds close to hand-written C++ contracts, facilitating the execution of millions of transactions per second on a single core.
Bandwidth Efficiency: Through innovative compression strategies and a custom data ingestion layer, Somnia drastically minimizes the bandwidth required for transaction data.
Storage Speed: The introduction of specialized cache-friendly Merkle trees for state updates and proofs significantly reduces the storage overhead, making the platform highly efficient for both validators and users.
Signature Verification: Somnia introduces a transaction batching protocol which drastically reduces the computational resources needed for verifying transaction authenticity.
Architectural Overview
Somnia's architecture is divided into two main components:
Data Frontend: This layer is responsible for generating a globally ordered stream of bytes without interpreting the underlying data. It ensures that transaction data is published and consensus is reached efficiently.
Execution Backend: This component interprets the byte stream as transaction data, executing EVM transactions to update the blockchain's state. It features a custom EVM compiler that significantly optimizes and accelerates transaction processing.
Key Innovations
Somnia introduces several key innovations that address common bottlenecks in blockchain performance:
Independent Data Chains: Each validator operates its own blockchain, or "data chain," which allows for independent block production. This unique approach eliminates the need for a consensus mechanism within individual data chains, streamlining the data processing workflow.
Consensus Chain: A separate blockchain aggregates the heads of all data chains, employing a modified Hotstuff algorithm for proof of stake consensus. This structure decouples data production from the consensus process, significantly enhancing overall efficiency.
Advanced Compression Techniques: The Somnia architecture is designed to enable streaming compression in order to maximize data throughput. Somnia combines this with BLS signature aggregation in order to achieve extremely high compression ratios, allowing for massive transaction data throughput.
Optimized State Management: The platform eliminates traditional full state Merkle trees in favor of two smaller, cache-friendly Merkle trees, drastically speeding up state updates by making different light client tradeoffs.
Conclusion
Somnia represents a significant leap forward in blockchain technology, offering a scalable, efficient, and robust platform for high-throughput applications. With its innovative architecture and cutting-edge solutions to longstanding challenges. We should be clear so far we have developed an MVP of this chain and there is a journey of iteration to get to a mainnet.
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